To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions what information his Department holds on the performance of (a) private sector providers and (b) in-house teams providing Pathways to Work schemes from the start of the contracts to the end of October 2008. (263405)

Official Statistics on the performance of private sector providers delivering Pathways to Work Schemes will be available in summer 2009.

The Department does collect high level, aggregate management information on Provider Led Pathways performance. It is to be expected that in the normal course of managing their business, Departments will have available and use more recent very often incomplete data, from a range of sources, than are available from Official Statistics at a particular point in time, but this has not been quality assured and would give an incomplete picture of performance.

The Department publishes regular performance monitoring reports for Jobcentre Plus led Pathways. The latest published official statistics available show that up to September 2008, there had been 1,038,910 starts to the programme and the total number of job entries was 143,650 up to March 2008.